Menu

Hardrock-50 HF Amplifier Build Complete!

Today I finished building my Hardrock-50 50w HF Amplifier kit. It was pretty-much done yesterday, but needed a few final tweaks to complete.

I haven’t photographed every stage of the build process, but I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it! Apologies for the quality of these photos too… I was in solder-mode rather than photography-mode, so they’re not well lit or composed I’m afraid.

Continuing on from my previous blog post, I started by winding the torroids. My fingers hurt after doing these, and working with PTFE covered wire is a pain in the bum! There’s a fella in the US that can sell you a complete set of pre-wound torroids for a nominal fee, but where’s the fun in that?

Next was soldering the metal stand-offs to the main board which was easy:

Here you can see the bottom of the main board after I had soldered in all the through-hole components:

And here is the top of the main board. A couple of the torroids were really fiddly to attach.

This is the main board attached to the heatsink with the front and rear panels connected. The only big problem I had was that I snapped the drill bit while drilling the second to last hole, so the main board is only attached at the rear (but it isn’t going anywhere!)

Here it is, alive!

This photo shows me on the air with it for the first time last night:

I’ll write another quick blog post later on showing the amplifier case in more detail and along side my Elecraft KX-3 (my photos haven’t synced via iCloud yet!)